Because common sense is genuinely uncommon and comes across as a breath of fresh air when someone uses it. Because who are we to argue with Samuel Taylor Coleridge?
Now you’ll wonder who Coleridge is. In these times of thrillers and romcoms on OTTs, I suppose reading classic poetry would be an obsolete pastime. Yet, there are those of us who hail from a world where paper was valued more than screens and words could paint pictures that moved us to emotion. For me, poetry isn’t just a pastime. It is also a window to wisdom, for hidden in poetry are lessons of life. Unbeknown to many, poetry, while itself a work of the poet’s imagination, is often underlaid with that rarest of rare human commodity. Common sense.
“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Take Coleridge’s own poem – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It speaks of a wizened mariner who tells the tale of a shipwreck and misfortune at a wedding. He speaks of how he had been part of a crew lost on a ship in the South Atlantic, close to the South Pole. In the first part of the poem, an albatross becomes a symbol of hope and guidance for the lost sailors, but this ancient mariner kills it. Subsequently, a series of further misfortune befalls the doomed crew and they all die one by one until only this mariner is left to live with his guilt and to tell the tale. It’s a grim poem but it’s also a cautionary tale on what happens when you take leave of your senses. It’s the same cautionary tale that one finds in The Lotos-Eaters by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It is only the firm determination and will of the Greek hero Ulysses (Odysseus) that breaks the spell and sees him and his crew sail home from an enchanted island that no one ever left. A warning on the dangers of the unknown that befall men when they refuse to rely on their common sense.
I see this as a particularly acute issue in the land of my birth – India. We procrastinate far too much, wait too long, ending up having to create solutions for problems that had never existed. It’s a trend I see in family decisions, workplaces and pretty much every area of life. Especially on Indian roads. Just look in any direction and you will see at least one illogical thing happening that beats common sense. Fact is, common sense is actually the second rarest human commodity in existence. The rarest is perhaps kindness.
This uncommonly strong ability to resist common sense is so embedded in us now that I have been thanked on a number of occasions for things that I would assume are just plain common sense. If there are two cars on a narrow road and one of them is at the wider bit, then that car has to wait for the other to pass or else they’ll all be stuck. Common sense, right? Hand on your heart, tell me this is what you see happening in your city and not two drivers yelling at each other, stuck in jam created by a clash of stupid egos. Or take your average motorcyclist or scooterist in a traffic jam. They will somehow squeeze their front wheels through any gap that the wheel can pass through. Hey! There’s still the rest of the machine to pass through, which means space. Right? Isn’t it just common sense? Again, look around and you’ll begin to get the drift of what I’m trying to say here.
All too often you’ll find social media awash with news of how pet owners got into a spat with others because the latter would refuse to share space with a dog. It’s common sense, a dog can bite and people are afraid. So if you have a dog, ask the passengers in the lift if they are comfortable. Otherwise, use the other lift. It’s not as if we don’t have common sense. It’s just that there seems to be a steadfast refusal to use it.
Why? Beats me. But I do know that those we look up to as models of wisdom, are essentially people who show an uncommon propensity for common sense. Just like Coleridge had said. And that’s exactly why men should start using common sense. Because it means you won’t have to sit and create solutions for problems that don’t exist, or find yourself in inexplicable situations. Because in a sea of nincompoops where common sense is so uncommon, you’ll come across as a breath of fresh air.
Why Men Should 